Collecting and playing the Pokémon Trading Card Game seems fun and frivolous, and it is, but after a year of playing the game competitively I have come to liken the hobby to a gambling addiction.
"Just ten more packs... I might finally get a Darkrai EX"
Pokémon is a massive and hugely influential part of my childhood, a time that most look back on fondly and get a warm fuzzy feeling in their bellies called nostalgia. I used to spend hours hammering the 'A' button on my Game Boy Color trying to catch animated pocket monsters in red and white balls, the motto 'Gotta catch 'em all' permanently branded onto my brain by the long hot iron of Nintendo. It was and still is, bloody brilliant.
One of the most satisfying pursuits of adulthood I have discovered so far is revisiting my childhood hobbies and being able to afford the things I couldn't, back when I got £2.50 a week pocket money and I spent most of it on sweets. I'm not saying I had a deprived childhood or anything, in fact I was very lucky and I'm grateful for it, but there's something strangely indulging about holding ten Pokémon booster packs in your hand at once, when as a child you might get one pack every week or two if you were lucky.
I suppose it's this that started me off. I was wandering around the Kingsmead Shopping Centre in Farnborough one lunch hour back in late 2010 and I spotted a pack of the latest Pokémon cards in a shop window. I hadn't bought a pack in nearly 10 years, so out of pure curiosity I handed over £4 and picked one up. The cards inside were mostly from the era of Pokémon that I knew and loved; including Machop, Dragonite and a Pidgeotto... needless to say I was immediately hooked again.
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| The contents of my first pack of cards from the HS Triumphant set. |
Some Googles later and it turns out people make YouTube videos of themselves opening packs of cards for other people to watch. They rack up thousands of views, too. I suppose they must be popular with kids who can't afford to buy many packs of cards and get a slight fix from watching somebody else unwrap the unknown contents of a booster pack. Well I was hopelessly transfixed too. Convinced by internet videos that cards from Japan with pictures of cute monsters on them was the easiest path to happiness and armed with a recent Christmas bonus, that month I spent £150 on Pokémon cards. This was just the beginning.
Pokémon cards are released in sets every 2-3 months. Each set contains around 100-120 new cards, some rarer and more sparkly than others. Initially I started out as a collector, just aiming to complete each set. The artwork on the cards is actually really well done, dozens of Japanese artists are commissioned to bring each character, item and location to life - to me it was like collecting miniature paintings, but instead of hanging them on my wall I would slip them into archival acid-free plastic sleeves and safely store them in a binder on my bookshelf.
Something The Pokémon Company deserves a lot of credit for is keeping up their organised play events, and at a high standard too. All over the world you can find weekly leagues full of kids, young adults and not-so-young-anymore adults who all share a passion for Pokémon. It's not just something you collect, it's also a game and a very competitive one. Based on the current rotation of 'legal' cards, players construct a 60-card deck that is used in one-on-one battles with other players. The most common way to win follows the principals of the Pokémon video games - defeat six of your opponent's monsters, but there are endless strategies in how you can achieve this and then there are other ways you can outsmart and beat your opponent on top of this. Just as Pokémon Red and Blue on the Game Boy brilliantly introduced us to complex Japanese RPGs without us realising it, the Pokémon TCG introduced western children to a strategic card game based on wit and statistics.
Naturally I took my new-found hobby to the next level and started taking part in weekly league games and seasonal tournaments. This is where things get really expensive. To put together even a slightly competitive deck I had to start buying individual cards from eBay. Most cards in a set are useless in gameplay except for a handful, which typically are the hardest cards to find. You're looking at roughly £100 minimum for a competitive deck of 60 cards. I mentioned new sets are released every couple of months, this means that the metagame is constantly changing, players are pressured to keep up and collect all the good cards. Sometimes these cards will go on ebay for £50 a copy and you will need 3 or 4 in your deck. Herein lies the problem. I pay rent, I pay utility bills, I pay taxes and then I have to feed myself too. If I want to stay competitive in the Pokémon card game I need to be spending a couple of hundred pounds a month on cards.
One of the recent popular cards that was popping up in most successful competitive decks was 'Darkrai EX' from the 'Dark Explorers' expansion, a set of 111 cards. I bought 105 Dark Explorers booster packs over the course of a couple of months, that's one thousand and fifty cards. How many copies of Darkrai EX did I pull? Not one. Not one sodding copy. At an average cost of £3.25 per pack, I spent the best part of £350 and I didn't get one copy of this highly sought-after card. Soon after this string of disappointment, I made a 200 mile round trip to the National Championships in Kettering where I suffered bitter defeat by people playing decks with 3 to 4 copies of this elusive card.
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| The highly desirable Darkrai EX card. |
I appreciate that I am not the target audience for this game, but that's just worse because the target audience is 10 year olds and most players are students so I am amazed that this gameplay model is still working after so many years. Yes, the top players who win the World Championships are great players regardless of how much money they have, but unfortunately I feel a lot of what this game comes down to is who can afford the best cards and how quickly they can get hold of them. A problem I found myself having was that by the time I caught up and managed to get enough of a certain card to start putting in practice with a deck, the cards had moved on and there were more cards that I needed in order to carry on playing. It's an endless, very expensive cycle that personally I feel I need to put a stop to before I end up living off baked beans and working three jobs just to sustain the hobby.
So is that it? Do I quit? For now, I have turned my attention towards Fantasy Flight Games and their 'Living Card Game' model, which I think is the way forward for card games. This is based on the same idea that the card game expands and stays fresh with new sets of cards, but rather than blindly buying endless packs of cards or shelling out top coin on eBay, packs are predetermined so you know exactly what you are getting. Sure, it may lack those joyous moments when you pull a sparkly super-rare card from a booster pack, but like the cards, those moments are few and far between - greatly overshadowed by the more common disappointment of not getting the cards you want. I am taking up the Star Wars Living Card Game and I'm also going to dabble in the A Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings Living Card Games, all highly acclaimed products from Fantasy Flight Games and licenses that I'm a huge fan of also.
I couldn't possibly end on a downer for the Pokémon TCG, though. Despite my issues, it still is a really great game, I have met some brilliant people and have had a lot of fun along the way - it just isn't working for me right now and I hope any PTCG player out there reading this can understand that. I will probably pick up the odd booster pack here and there, I'm just stepping out of the hardcore realm of collecting and competitive play. I am and I always will be a huge Pokémon fan - you just need to step into my living room to see the posters, toys and postcards that decorate my shelves and walls to know this. A long time ago Pokémon helped me realise that pretty much everything I was interested in originated from Japan, where I later travelled to and have come to know and love for so many reasons, not just their wacky cartoon characters. For this, I thank you Nintendo, Game Freak and The Pokémon Company.
